Detailed planning – Responsibilities and resources
Skill and experience
There are a few points to consider when allocating responsibilities and resources.
You may need to take into account that staff will not always have the right skill and experience.
In fact you may need to allow for extra time for additional training in the schedule.
Skill training is not the only type of training that may be necessary.
It may include health and safety, legal and environmental training.
Certain tasks may need specific qualifications.
Availability
Will the resource be available when you expect?
Departments may not release staff to the project full time or when you expect.
Training, holidays
There may well be unproductive time in learning on the job apart from any initial training.
Apart from this there will be holidays, including bank holidays and sickness.
Most people will only be available for 80% of the time.
Unproductive time
There could be other unproductive time.
The supervision or training of others will take you away from your own activity.
Poor initial communication may waste time with additional questions and explanations.
Optimum number of staff
What you have may not be the optimum number of staff in terms of flexibility for certain aspects of the task.
It is not only the number of personnel who carry out the task that is important but the mix of skills.
Constraints from externally imposed deadlines
External effects may well throw a spanner in the works.
These may be over and above those constraints you are already aware of.
Training
When looking at training consider how it is going to be carried out:
- Internal or external
Consider the cost and resource impact.
- Train the trainer or the users directly
Think about the consistency of the training, cost and resource implications.
- What detail is needed?
Is it user based or does it include wider business issues?
- Timing of the training.
This is vital if task completions are not to be delayed.